When my son was diagnosed, he had bronchitis, used cortisone (Prelone) and antibiotics. To find an answer to why this happened, I looked at the medicine leaflets and found that the cortisone’s side effects stated “Excessive metabolic effects…precipitation of the diabetic state.” For me, it means that it may possibly have an influence on becoming a type 1 diabetic. I can’t find any reference in studies that this may be the case, but I am not a doctor. Can you maybe answer this or point me to an answer to the question of why this happened? We don’t have any history of diabetes.

You are correct that diabetes can sometimes be “precipitated” by use of glucocorticoid medications like cortisone, prednisone, prednisolone, etc. These are medications used to decrease inflammation, but if someone is genetically susceptible to develop diabetes, the illness itself or the use of the steroids can tip the scales, so to speak. Most kids don’t have a very strong family history of type 1 diabetes in their relatives so this is not so uncommon. You should review this with your diabetes team since they will then review or have already learned about your family history and genetic potentials and can give you more specific information. In general, however, there are not very well known specific causes of type 1 diabetes although there are several interesting theories about viral infections, environmental precipitants like BPA, phthalates, etc. but mostly there is unknown causation and also some interesting groupings of type 1 diabetes especially in Scandinavians compared to other nationalities but even these are not well explained. Those of African, Arab and Asian nationalities were thought to have less type 1 diabetes than Caucasians but even in those groups, type 1 diabetes seems to be on the rise.

SB